A Danger to Health: Huge Strawberries

Spring is the season of strawberries. Recently, there are extraordinarily large and red strawberries on the market which are well received by customers. They look attractive and taste good. However, they bring dangers to our health at the same time. They are harmful to people, especially to patients of kidney diseases. 

As we know, except nutrition such as vitamins and minerals, strawberries are rich in carotene, citric acid, dextrose, laevulose as well as riboflavin. These nutriments are quite necessary to the growth of children. However, huge strawberries do not make contribution to the health, but lay heavy burdens to our organs. It is because that some ripening agents and fruit-expanders are added to the fertilizers in the hope of growing huge and beautiful strawberries. These chemicals accelerate the segmentation of cells so that strawberries are unexpectedly huge in size. But such strawberries are dangerous to our health. If consumers eat the chemicals by accident, their kidneys could not work as usual.

In fact, some strawberries are born to be big. For example, the Japanese strawberries are famous for their large sizes. They could be as heavy as 100 grams. But most of the time, the huge sizes of strawberries are the results of fruit-expanders. Although these chemicals do expand the sizes, they would make strawberries become easy to rot and less nutritious. If there are harmful chemicals left in them, strawberries would be harmful to health. Therefore, it is important to distinguish such strawberries from ordinary ones.

Then how can we avoid eating such unhealthy strawberries? First of all, we should judge the quality by their shapes. Normal strawberries are of the shape of heart, while huge strawberries are usually of conic shapes. If their shapes are too weird, do not choose them. Secondly, if the hormones are used in the growing process, the color of strawberries would not be evenly distributed. Sometimes, they would look green at the bottom and red at the top. Thirdly, the seeds on the surface of normal strawberries are golden, while the seeds of inferior ones are rather red. Fourthly, if you break off with fingers, you will find low qualities strawberries are white and empty in the middle. But ordinary strawberries are full. In addition, we can judge them by their tastes. We all know that good strawberries are sweet, but huge ones are tasteless. Besides, strawberries are grown in the ground and they are easy to be polluted by bacteria. So we have to keep in mind that even normal strawberries should be carefully washed before eating.